JERICHO ECHO ARTICLE
March 1981
Tradition has it that Brasenose College gets its name from the brass door knocker on their first hostel. Now the sign of a student hostel is a huddle of lidless and overflowing dustbins, a pile of bikes and a rundown, damp house standing in a derelict garden. Or there is the slabsided block of self-contained rabbit hutches surrounded by bare and littered ground and a potholed car Dark. That's the upmarket end, for foreign students.
Maybe the Master of Ruskin College expressed a widely held view when, at a public meeting, he put forward the claim that four old houses, occupied by his students for the past ten years, ought to be demolished as they were unfitted for human hesitation. The remrk did not go unnoticed and it was pointed out that houses could be rehabilitated. The significance is that the College had known, for ten years that it was housing its students in substandard accommodation and had done nothing about it. Is this an exception or do the Colleges of the University and the many peripheral Language Schools, Secretarial and other educational establishments really think of students as sub-human 'course fodder' there only to provide jobs for the tutors and teachers or as human beings entitled to decent living conditions.
Go round Jericho, for example, down Juxon Street and Walton Street in particular, and see if you can spot the student hostels. Do you wonder the students feel alienated? Particularly those from abroad who are only in Oxford for a few months. They are herded together in tiny rooms with no common rooms, no amenities, no nothing. So they sit in their rooms with trannies blaring and hold noisy, all night parties. Why should they care about the unknown neighbours. They are paying the earth so they feel they are entitled to behave as as they like. The Colleges don't care.
This is not 'student bashing'. All we want to see is residential houses used for the purpose that they were built for. For family occupation, and God knows there is a need for it, and the students housed in properly built, properly supervised accommodation. You cannot put all the blame on the landlords who let their houses and flats out to block leases either. They are in it for the money its true, and nothing else, but some of the leases have been taken by Colleges whose better known buildings figure on post cards and in guide books.
Most of the students dare not complain because of the difficulty of finding anywhere to live but we do ask why the N.U.J. stays silent? Why? As for the residents who have to live with the noise and squalor ,we are sick of it. We see residential housing suitable for family occupation bought up by speculators, private and official, stuffed to overflowing with students, while the buildings are allowed to rot to the point where the owner can say that they are beyond repair and can therefore rip them down and build new kennels to hold yet more students, paying even higher rents. The student slums of the future.